Jack of Harts

Kathleen Reynolds and her Spittin’ Kittens were resting and relaxing at the beach when the Shang attacked us. They had to weather the fall of Yosemite Station like everybody else in America, though less debris hit their spacebase than western spacebases. The local automated defenses were able to burn most of the debris up before landfall, reducing property damage to a minimum, and Katy and her people got to their fighters and launched with only minor difficulties. They actually beat some of the ready fighter squadrons into the air, though they were not exactly in their regulation uniforms at the time. A local news crew recorded their scramble from the beach to the fighters, though the segment that made air required some strategic placement of black bars. It was one of many videos later spliced together by the military showing our brave men and women going to war. They called it a moral boosting video. They were not wrong.

Kathleen Reynolds started flying back when the Blackhawk was still a frontline starfighter, and gained promotion after promotion over time until the brass gave her the Spittin’ Kittens. They were a Hellcat squadron often sent out to protect high-value colonies, and she found her niche. The brass left her in command of that squadron for decades, shuffling them from planet to planet as the needs of the service commanded. That wasn’t the career death sentence it was before Contact by the way. The increased lifespans filtering through the military and other parts of society back then meant that commanders weren’t aging out and retiring anymore. The only way to get a command was to build something new, or inherit the spot of a dead man or someone who fraked up badly enough to get themselves cashiered. That made command positions rather more stable than they had been, and Katy proved that she could do stable if she meant to.